Like Regis Nicoll, Ben Witherington, Amy Hall, and others, I find the recent “Gabriel Revelation” discovery to be a rather interesting piece of new historical information, but certainly not upsetting to our beliefs. It is a stone tablet, dated to sometime in the 1st century BC, that tells of a Messiah killed and resurrected after three days. It will undoubtedly stoke the imaginations of those who think the Jesus story was concocted out of various dying God myths.

Does it undermine what we know of Christianity? Hardly. The followers of Christ—even those closest to him—are depicted as being completely caught off guard, first by Jesus’ predictions of his death, and then by the actual event. Their expectations were hardly molded by this stone or any related beliefs.

The resurrection is solidly attested in the Biblical documents, dated to within a short period after the events. 1 Corinthians 15 could not have been written more than about 20 years after the events, when some 500 eyewitnesses were still alive to attest to it. I urge you to read it, and see for yourself just how central it was to Paul’s message that the resurrection actually happened.

The whole dying-God-invented-Jesus theory is hard to swallow in any event. The message of Christ just hangs together too well, and contains much too deep wisdom, to have been cobbled together from various myths by the Jesus community, like so much tossed salad, in the generation or two after his death. In one of his most uniquely insightful essays, C.S. Lewis pointed out that those who think this possible simply haven’t read enough:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage — though it may no doubt contain errors — pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.

If this stone tablet is a prediction of a dying and resurrecting Messiah, it is hardly the first. Christians are quite comfortable with such predictions; in fact, we’ve been pointing them out for ages. They start (admittedly vaguely) right at the beginning in Genesis 3:15; they continue in places like Psalm 16 and Psalm 22; they reach a peak in Isaiah 53.

So “The Gabriel Revelation” is interesting, no doubt, and will prove to be more so as we learn more about it. We need not worry, though, about it undermining what we know about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.